The ‘Housewife’ on an Education Mission: An Ethnographic Portrait

Abstract

The article employs the ethnographic portrait of the founder and co-owner of a chain of girls’ madrasas in a Muslim-dominated mofussil town in Uttar Pradesh to illuminate the current moment at which girls’ madrasas stand in a rapidly changing India. These madrasas use a range of imaginaries from the global ummah to the pious educated Indian Muslim woman to recast madrasa education, offering a mix of formalised religious education and modern schooling in safe ‘purdah’ institutions. The article illustrates how girls’ madrasas are both a source and result of the changing imagery of the kamil momina 1 or ideal Islamic woman in India. It teases out the connections between these various strands to illustrate larger social implications and argues that contemporary girls’ madrasas do not conform to the binaries of social reproduction and empowerment that have been conventionally applied to studies on madrasas.